NY appeals court to consider local fracking bans

The oil and gas law, West said, is intended to ensure extraction of the maximum amount of oil and gas from a large area, protect the mineral rights of multiple landowners, and prevent waste of the resource.

"When a municipality says you can't drill here, you have the ultimate waste of the resource and destruction of the correlative rights of the landowners," West said.

Shaun Goho, an environmental lawyer and instructor at Harvard Law School who is not directly involved in the Dryden and Middlefield cases, said local ordinances related to oil and gas drilling have been common for years in many states, including Texas and Colorado. But local laws are getting a lot of attention around the country now, he said, because drilling is moving into areas that haven't had to deal with it before and many communities are enacting bans that industry is challenging.

In Colorado, an industry group is suing the city of Longmont over a fracking ban approved by the city's voters in November. The city council in Fort Collins recently passed a similar ban. In Pennsylvania, seven municipalities have filed a lawsuit challenging a 2012 state law that takes away their ability to control gas drilling operations through local zoning.

But many town boards in upstate New York have declined resident requests for bans. The majority of bans are outside the counties along the Pennsylvania border where drilling is most likely to be focused in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale if Gov. Andrew Cuomo decides to lift the state moratorium - a decision he has repeatedly postponed.

"This case comes down to this," said Dryden Town Supervisor Mary Ann Sumner. "Who should make the decision affecting the use of our land? The people who live here, who can identify a particular bend in the road or hayfield or sensitive wetland or bog? Do we have that choice or do we leave it to people in corporate offices thousands of miles away who know nothing of our lifestyle?"